Biannual Performance Check-ins

Performance Check-ins

Performance check-ins are 1:1 with your manager focused on your professional development. They happen twice a year, in January and July.

Performance check-ins are kind of like a performance review, in that it’ll tell you what you’re doing well, where you can improve, and how you can progress in your career.

But they are way less formal. And the focus is on growth and development; not performance management.

For managers

Logistics

• Performance check-ins get announced in #tremendous-announcements
• Give your direct report a heads up as to which 1:1 you’d like to use for the check in

Preparing for the actual 1:1

• Frame as an opportunity to aid professional development
• Consider your direct report’s long-term goals. What is it going to take for them to get there? How might they do that? What’s missing?
• Some resources on how to do this well: Manager’s handbook, Manager’s path, High Output Management.
• Pulling together data
• When prepping, think of yourself as a coach. Focus on recognizing progress and identifying future areas of growth.
• Consider gathering feedback from people who work with or report to your direct report- a Slack DM or a short Zoom chat is usually plenty.
• It’s worth covering progress over 6+ months—go through commits, look at notes from past 1:1s, whatever.
• There shouldn’t be any surprising info communicated
• If you’ve been delivering feedback on an ongoing basis, you shouldn’t be communicating new or surprising information to your direct report, but rather synthesizing things that have been discussed piecemeal with a big-picture lens.
• If you find yourself in a position where you need to communicate something surprising, ping your manager (or Kapil) and we’ll figure it out
• Do a writeup
• You’ll want to summarize your thoughts and share them in written form with your direct report

FAQ

Why doesn’t Tremendous do full performance reviews?

• Partially because reviews are generally reviled, with some orgs having done away with them entirely.
• They’re time consuming. Writing peer feedback or self-assessments can be a time sink. At this stage, we don’t think they’re worth the time and hassle.
• They’re tricky to modify once in place.

Tremendous performance check-ins are designed to be simple, low-overhead, and easy to make modifications to as we grow.

How often do these happen?

Twice a year.

Will these things affect comp decisions?

• Sort of. Performance is one of the three reasons we give out raises in our 🏦Compensation Policy.
• But your performance is actually the sum of the work that you’ve already done, and this is in the past and one of these check-ins isn’t going to change that.
• A good way to think about these is “if I am able to implement the things that my manager and I discuss, I should be well positioned for a raise or a promotion in the future.”

Do they work?

• Yes!
• Managers used to report that their direct reports were hungry for structured feedback about how they’re doing. This was corroborated by Lattice surveys– Our two lowest scores from the Q3 ‘22 were related to receiving regular feedback (source).
• We introduced performance check-ins in December ‘22. They were positively received, and we saw ~20pt increases in the associated Lattice scores (source).

On what dates do they happen?

See